Black--Snow wrote:Feeling "fresh" is not something I care about at all. That's a really odd argument for promoting DLC because it's 250% subjective. X3 doesn't feel fresh to me at all, but I still happily play Albion Prelude with more enthusiasm than the 'fresher' X: rebirth.

AP is the most recent expansion pack of X3, though (whichs base version is over a decade old by now ._. )

(And XR is simply a different game which broke for the largest part with the previous X games, so its not entirely fair to compare those)

AP is still fairly old, although it's an expansion pack it's not recent, it doesn't make x3 feel "fresh".
Freshness is not, as I see it, ability to keep up with the times. The timelessness of the game is important, but is completely seperate from releasing content patches. I tend to leave games with constant updates on the shelf for years at a time before coming back to them because the game is almost literally the same, except for a small addition.
V1: do X
V2: new play through, do X to be able to do new feature Y
V3: new play through, do X to be able to do new feature Z

Even worse is if instead of a new playthrough you load an old one and play with the new feature for 10 minutes before resigning to "huh, that's cool" and forgetting about it.

I do the above with RimWorld, and it starts to get repetitive especially without mods (game lost most mod support when one of their dependencies wasn't updated with the game).

Black--Snow wrote:Feeling "fresh" is not something I care about at all. That's a really odd argument for promoting DLC because it's 250% subjective. X3 doesn't feel fresh to me at all, but I still happily play Albion Prelude with more enthusiasm than the 'fresher' X: rebirth.

Having more of something afterwards is hardly ever a negative thing. Even paid DLC, once the base game is 100% complete is never really a bad thing.

Now again, having a 100% of the promised features in a LT day one release is OF COURSE preferable, though might not be realistic. However, even if this happens, having extra stuff added though out the years (and so making it "fresh") is hardly a bad thing.

Black--Snow wrote:Feeling "fresh" is not something I care about at all. That's a really odd argument for promoting DLC because it's 250% subjective. X3 doesn't feel fresh to me at all, but I still happily play Albion Prelude with more enthusiasm than the 'fresher' X: rebirth.

Having more of something afterwards is hardly ever a negative thing. Even paid DLC, once the base game is 100% complete is never really a bad thing.

Now again, having a 100% of the promised features in a LT day one release is OF COURSE preferable, though might not be realistic. However, even if this happens, having extra stuff added though out the years (and so making it "fresh") is hardly a bad thing.

It's not a bad thing to add new stuff, it is a bad thing to postpone part of the game until later just because you can. I like when games are updated at least semi-regularly, it makes the game feel different when you know it's still an active game and not forgotten.

Originally with LT I was skeptical about Josh's whole "barebones at launch but more later" philosophy but it seems he's scrapped that one now and is going for gold.

Black--Snow wrote:Feeling "fresh" is not something I care about at all. That's a really odd argument for promoting DLC because it's 250% subjective. X3 doesn't feel fresh to me at all, but I still happily play Albion Prelude with more enthusiasm than the 'fresher' X: rebirth.

Having more of something afterwards is hardly ever a negative thing. Even paid DLC, once the base game is 100% complete is never really a bad thing.

Now again, having a 100% of the promised features in a LT day one release is OF COURSE preferable, though might not be realistic. However, even if this happens, having extra stuff added though out the years (and so making it "fresh") is hardly a bad thing.

It's not a bad thing to add new stuff, it is a bad thing to postpone part of the game until later just because you can. I like when games are updated at least semi-regularly, it makes the game feel different when you know it's still an active game and not forgotten.

Originally with LT I was skeptical about Josh's whole "barebones at launch but more later" philosophy but it seems he's scrapped that one now and is going for gold.

My understanding was that Josh was always planning to release a feature complete LT 1.0. Other than some not promised features like player faction control and players owning planets.

It was some of the members here who have recently sugggested that a feature complete LT 1.0 might not be realistic. Myself it was due to the last two years being almost all sideways development and knowing that the crowd funding money must be starting to get dry.

Last edited by Zanteogo on Mon Jan 30, 2017 2:07 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Zanteogo wrote:
My understanding was that Josh was always planning to release a feature complete LT 1.0. Other than some unpromising features like player faction control and players owning planets.

It was some of the members here who have recently sugggested that a feature complete LT 1.0 might not be realistic. Myself it was due to the last two years being almost all sideways development and knowing that the crowd funding money must be starting to get dry.

"Unpromising"?
Player faction control was like 25% of the appeal of LT for me. :V

Zanteogo wrote:
My understanding was that Josh was always planning to release a feature complete LT 1.0. Other than some unpromising features like player faction control and players owning planets.

It was some of the members here who have recently sugggested that a feature complete LT 1.0 might not be realistic. Myself it was due to the last two years being almost all sideways development and knowing that the crowd funding money must be starting to get dry.

"Unpromising"?
Player faction control was like 25% of the appeal of LT for me. :V

Ugh, I was meaning to say unpromisded or not promised, it was autocorrected I guess.

As Cornflakes explained, limited faction ownership for players at release.

I struggle to understand this thread. This thread which appears in (it seems like) every game which ends up running long on development time.

The fundamental premise is that development time is tied direct (or indirectly, but strongly) to feature inclusion. I submit this premise is flawed generally, but especially in such a specific case as this one, where development has been stalled not due to feature development but due to technology issues.

The reason the premise is flawed generally is that creating graphical assets, including areas the player can interact in, items, textures, models for NPCs and objects in the world, take the largest segment of most development processes. Another huge segment is troubleshooting: you have a vision, you have knowledge, you have a code-base, why isn't X working as it should? -- This is reiterated hundreds of times or more. Other areas of time consumption are testing across multiple user-platforms (this will be proxied by users during beta, presumably) and marketing/sales which has already occurred for the current funding run and can be re-visited after a complete game is released given that Josh has plenty of people just waiting to provide word of mouth for his product.

Troubleshooting requirements will occur pretty much regardless of anything being cut. Modeling and texture needs were addressed in the original vision of LT and there has been no news to suggest that this has changed: requirements for graphical development, aside from creating the base system to allow for PCG, should be much smaller for LT. He's not creating a specific set of areas, items, and assets, he's telling the engine *how* to make them itself. This is one of LT's greatest strengths.

The reason the premise is flawed with regard to this project *in particular,* is that in fact, troubleshooting appears to be what has taken up the majority of the last two years. Sure, there is an argument to be made that fewer features requires less troubleshooting, but I get the impression that the troubleshooting required isn't due to feature density. Perhaps clarification can be had on this matter, but even if feature density *is* the reason our lone-coder is running into the ~million lines of code limitation, we don't know how far past that he'd need to be in order to cut whatever marginal features we're discussing we might be willing to see die so it's likely an exercise in futility from that perspective as well.

That's without going in to how much releasing a feature-incomplete 1.0 will cause support to be lost and thus damage the options available for the previously mentioned post-release marketing he'll want to do to continue making money off this IP.

kaeroku, is it possible that certain features are significant contributors to the core architectural challenge?

I'm with you that just randomly whacking features probably won't help. But not only is LT different from most games -- as you pointed out -- in solving the usual content-creation bottleneck through procedural content generation (PCG), it's also different in being a LOT more dependent on dynamics/simulation for its active gameplay content.

There may be potentially hundreds of star systems, many of which may have many active NPCs, many of which will be actively engaged in relatively (for a game) complex reasoning, in any instance of Limit Theory. All that activity -- which is to say, all the features dependent on high simulation -- requires processor cycles. Even with LOD crunching, a feature like "global markets" puts a significant additional burden on what the architecture must support in a performant way on many different computers.

But what if people were willing to temporarily back-burner that particular feature, and maybe a few others that together prevented a "quick" first architecture from running acceptably well?

I don't know that such a reduction in requirements would work or be generally acceptable.

But I don't think anyone who's not Josh has the necessary knowledge to assert that it's definitely not possible.